This is part of the latest Prospetcus Today article over at BaseballProspectus.com:

BaseballProspectus wrote:Not all the news is as good. Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Congress has rewarded baseball's players and management for their new steroid-testing program by issuing subpoenas to seven active and retired players, as well as demanding documents related to the '03 and '04 testing, including confidential results. The House Government Reform Committee, having fixed all the waste, duplication of effort, excessive complexity and outright contradictions in our nation's administrative codes, now turns its laser-like focus to baseball.

I'll be interested to see how aggressive the committee is in its questioning. You may recall that in 2001, Bud Selig and Donald Fehr (represented at the hearing by his brother, Steven), among others, were called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the game's financial state. Any hope of a productive outcome there was squelched by the efforts of committee chair James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), who rescued Selig from aggressive questioning on a number of occasions.

Regardless of the tone, these hearings are a waste of time, a publicity stunt designed to get names in the papers while avoiding real work. Congress can have no impact here, nor should it. Couching its interest in terms of the public good, the good of America's young athletes or some vague responsibility that Major League Baseball and its players have to those athletes, is a smokescreen that insults the intelligence of anyone capable of reading this.

It's a stunt, and should be given as much--or as little--attention as a bad stunt deserves. If the government really wants to call baseball onto the carpet and use its power to make the game and society better, it can address the massive subsidies of public stadia that have little to no real impact on their cities while shifting millions of dollars from taxpayers to a small cadre of owners. It can address the entertainment-deduction tax codes that, much more than the usual lament about player salaries, have served to price families out of the better seats in most ballparks.

Of course, those issues would require actual work, would be hard to explain to the media, and would be much less likely to produce headlines and cause cameras and microphones to appear. They'd also hurt major donors, which is probably much more germane than anything in the previous sentence.

Congress has no place in this matter, and its grandstanding on it is shameful.

Last edited by quietstorm on Thu Mar 10, 2005 6:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

If Congress gets their hands on those confidential tests from '03 and '04, how much do you wanna bet that names are leaked. Congress cannot keep anything confidential for long, so baseball better hope that if they get anything, its that they don't have to turn over those results.